I recently spent what seemed a lot of time up at Bogan Bay.  For those who don’t know where that is you just head up the M1 about 150 clicks north until you reach Lardtown and then turn right.   It’s an area where a lot of fat people congregate.  A bit like a gym.    Fortunately in late January most of the crowds that flock to the beachside area to wash had either self-immolated or been arrested for crimes against fashion. But there were still enough large specimens there to cause concern.  On the beach there were still the outcrops of large whale-like women who bobbed like giant watermelons when swimming accompanied by men with labourer’s tans who attempted to sand strut but in reality waddled, weighed down by excess body hair, oil and chains.  Some groups were decent enough to erect barriers in the form of large cheap tents to protect young kiddies from the end results of high fat, sugar and salt diets.   However there was still the danger that small children could be lost for days in the lava flow of convenience fat.

I want to make it very clear this is not a case of tagging the fatties.   However I do understand how it must seem as at one stage I was in favour of installing weighing machines at the gate of every school. If you were too fat – bad luck no school until you cut down the lard, fatso.  Simple but it probably needed a tweak.  My teenage obesity strategy of having a candidate risk a HSC percentile downgrade for every five kilos they were overweight also created comment.   I simply think that I was before my time or possibly didn’t properly sugarcoat the concept.

Look I have fat friends –  like Porky Rind who visibly shakes, sweats and gets an engorged member near a McDonalds – so I get it.  My caveat however is that I would not stand between Porky and a cream bum.  But what I don’t get is the lack of legislative action to stop these fat merchants of menace dominating the advertising landscape with impunity and sentencing an increasing number of people to a declining quality of life and ultimately an early death.

It’s no news that we are getting fatter as a nation and are losing the battle to remain moderately healthy. Figures compiled by Adelaide University’s Public Health Information Development Unit found that Bundaberg had the highest rate of obesity of any local government area.  Go Sugar Town! The obesity figures come after a Murdoch Children’s Research Institute study of 4000 Australian children which found that kids from poor families are three times more likely than the wealthiest kids to grow up obese.   We are heading towards a Gold in the Global Fat Olympics, according to the latest report of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Australia now ranks fourth in the list of the fattest country in the world. The Unites States, Mexico, and New Zealand are sitting comfortably at the first, second, and third positions, respectively.  Bloody Kiwis!  What a joke.  We are not even good enough or fat enough to slide into Bronze.

So to our summer of cricket and the role of the clown commentators in selling fat futures to the kiddies.  Over after over the Channel 9 commentators Slats, Heals, Bats, Bumhole and Tubby and every other minor character who ever waved a willow or bowled a bumper stepped up, dribbling, to eulogise the sponsors of their Summer of Fat.   Schooled in the subtleties of cross promotion they stepped up to the crease to baste us with never ending yarns about KFC.  They even had the pommy dope Michael ‘Vac’ Vaughan perched in some suspended sky-high dining room over the SCG eating a bucket of congealed chicken.  I’m not a believer but I prayed to the Creed (as in Saint Graham) for a violent windstorm to send ‘Vac”‘ and his fat-coated bucket heads crashing to the turf.

These are all people of privilege who have earned considerable wealth from sport.  These are the clowns that pay personal trainers to scythe off their winter coats because they can.  All come with the income, the education and lifestyle to know that eating this fat soaked rubbish is not good for you.  But still dribbling like deranged salesmen within an inch of their quarterly targets they continued to sell to all a relentless summer of salt, sugar and shite.

Of course ‘they’ claim that it is about education and parental responsibility.  It’s about choice. The marketplace.  They may say if people are too lazy and too stupid then it’s nothing to do with them.  Well I’m sorry you sad, selfish lot you may think that it is not your fault.  But you are wrong.  You have ignored your responsibility to the community that has afforded you a life where you can and should say no to the excesses of this fatzkrieg.  You Mark Nicholas, Michael Slater, Mark Taylor, Ian Healey and other minor mutes are simply a bunch of greedy, unprincipled, fat fuckers.